So Sun has splurged some $800 million in cash and taken up $200 million in options to purchase MySQL AB. It’s somewhat of an odd move really. I mean, Sun’s got a decent reputation for open source stuff (not always linux-friendly, but “open source” does not mean “linux” after all). Java is now GPL’d, openSolaris as well, there’s code finding its way from Sun to Linux at a kernel level, and there are other examples. But MySQL?
About the only thing that comes to mind right now is that we might see a push from Sun in the coming years away from the standard LAMP stack and towards OTMS/STMJ stacks (Opensolaris/Tomcat/MySQL/Servlet or Solaris/Tomcat/MySQL/JSP or some suitable combination) so we’d have a Sun-friendly stack looking for a piece of LAMP’s market share.
It hardly seems logical. PHP versus Servlet/JSP isn’t a sensible comparison. If you look at development time, PHP is so far ahead of JSP/Servlets that it’s not even a competition any more; and likewise if you look at runtimes, PHP is so far behind that it’s just not fair. There’s just no room for a particular stack to get itself chosen over the other if it’s not suitable. But then, that’s what a huge marketing department is for, right?
